APL2XML

APL2XML is part of the CategoryAplTree project.

Introduction

HelpAndManual (http://www.helpandmanual.com/) is by far the best software available for creating any sort of documentation. The software comes with a powerful editor that allows the user comfortably to edit all sorts of aspects of documentation, including references, a glossary, an index and a table of contents as a tree-structure. The application saves its data in XML files. The application compiles these files not only into ordinary Windows help files but also compiled help, RTF documents, PDF documents, web sites and electronic books.

That fact that it saves its internal data in ordinary XML files means that any application could create such XML files itself and then use HelpAndManual as a compiler in order to generate the preferred output format.

This is particularly useful for classes: plenty of useful information can be generated from class scripts automatically: a list of methods including their syntax as well as a list of properties and fields.

In the case where a class script contains information about itself following some simple and basic rules, these pieces of information can be used as well.

All the classes needed to achieve this goal are subsumed in the project APL2XML. With these classes one can create XML files which will be accepted by HelpAndManual as input files.

Note that ADOC has learned to make use of these classes with version 3. This means that one can use ADOC now in order to create help files as well as a bunch of other output formats.

Documentation

The zip file one can download as an attachment contains a workspace which in turn contains a function which creates a help file which describes the APL2XML project. Of course you need HelpAndManual in order to get this work.

If you want to have a look at the documentation right now: the help file is also contained in the zip file.

The workspace comes also with a couple of examples starting from simple to rather complex.

Project Page

For bug reports, future enhancements and a full version history see APL2XML/ProjectPage

Version Information

CategoryAplTree